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Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

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Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#211

Post by MattGaiser »

Clewza313 wrote: post #180
taurath wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find it sad that this is a debate given how much of a public good it is. $10m is absolutely nothing in the scheme of things.

I don't think anybody is begrudging them $10M/year, or even $100M/year for that matter. My concern is that the way their expenses keep spiralling upwards is a) not sustainable and b) introducing serious scope creep into their original mission. Here's the OG version by Jimmy Wales: "The sum of all human knowledge available to every person in the world." Here's what it currently looks like: "Empower and engage people a…

The 2nd one just tells me that they are actively engaging in the collection part now.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#212

Post by kaba0 »

mlang23 wrote: post #98
zozbot234 wrote: post #21

Let's be clear about this, the donation money isn't just used to keep the encyclopedia online. They have hundreds of language versions of Wikipedia itself, and many related "sister" projects, with perhaps the most clearly impacting being Wikimedia Commons (a huge repository of free-content media with a focus on educational use - including much media in the public domain) and Wikidata (a project that has now emerged a…

Maybe maybe. But most of the large organisations you are refering to make the money they pay their waste^Wmanagers with not from donations, and are typically also not relying on so much volunteer work. In my book, it is totally fine to demand that organisations that are largely based on volunteer work and dontations dont pay the typical manager salaries. Why should we look away if a mostly-volunteer driven project ge…

How about considering it not cancer but necessarily inefficiency? Like, are you angry at your car for not being 100% efficient?

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#213

Post by dlandau »

NeoVeles wrote: post #165
Clewza313 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because 10 years earlier WMF's expenses were $10M/year, and it's pretty debatable if they're delivering 10x more today than they were back then.

The thing that gets me is the Archive.org only has approximately $20 million USD of revenue and they run a system that is much more data intensive. The wayback machine alone is a data crunching monster and it is done for a small fraction of WMF.

I wish archive.org fundraised like WMF. Archive.org is super slow when it doesn't plain timeout with some message about server load.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#214

Post by zozbot234 »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #199
zozbot234 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's your idea of "survival"? Wikipedia has already been bleeding editors for a long time as the overall climate on the Web has shifted away from openness and towards profit-seeking and mindless consumption. They portray themselves as "essential infrastructure in the ecosystem of free knowledge" which looks like a factual and fair assessment to me. This is what must survive for the foreseeable future. It's not just…

Wikipedia is bleeding editors and keeping others away because of the ever more hostile environment. Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon. This is something they should work on. But as every club that get successful and was open (I attended many Wiki/Wikipedia meetups 20y ago) it gets more restricted and close to keep the masses out. What a shame.

> Try to edit something and you get blasted of Wikipeda very fast with a boatload of jargon.

"Trying to edit something" is a bad idea these days - the content is far too developed for that. Instead, post on the talk page with a description of your suggested edit, wait for people to object/complain/discuss, refine the text on talk if needed, then edit. It's pretty indistinguishable from a "pull request" workflow on github.

Yes, I know that a lot of novice-focused content advises people to edit directly. That's fine for fixing typos and bad grammer, not for substantive work.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#215

Post by abbe98 »

EvanDotPro wrote: post #49

After reading the article and the comments here so far, I'm legitimately struggling to decide how I should feel about this as a long-time WMF donor. I can understand the upset and deceit people are feeling, but I am also aware of the many initiatives WMF is behind, their endowment fund usage is strictly controlled from what I understand, and as a business owner, I also deeply sympathize with the idea of having "rainy…

You could donate to a local Wikimedia chapter or a thematic organization, they are doing a lot of great work in various areas and many of them are small enough for one to have an impact.

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_thematic_organizat...

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#216

Post by MattGaiser »

Jyaif wrote: post #187
ideamotor wrote: post #174

Oh fuck off, Wikipedia is one of the very few ethical resources promoting factual information on our planet at this point. Seriously, fuck this “news report.”

I personally don't find 400k salaries in a non-profit to be ethical.

You mean what a middle manager earns in a similar type of tech company? Wikipedia is already paying well below market.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#217

Post by lozenge »

jiggawatts wrote: post #170
thoughty wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would be very surprised if their spend was just $10M/year on their tech infra. That's very low. I expect it would be much higher. PS: I work for cloud computing company and have insight on how much costs increase with scale. edit: fixed typos.

Wikipedia is hosted on ordinary rackmount servers at a handful of colocation facilities: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_servers It does not significantly use cloud services, and as you can see by the picture of their racks, they use standard 1 RU pizzaboxes. Their workload is highly scalable horizontally, and doesn't even need much in the way of expensive "enterprise" hardware such a SAN arrays: https://up…

My information might be ten years out of date, but the vast majority of page views never hit PHP. If you are viewing a even slightly popular article and aren't logged in, your request is served by a Varnish cache.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#218

Post by exporectomy »

thomasahle wrote: post #144
bawolff wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of fuss has been made about this graph: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Editor_Retention_Upd... Roughly, English Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 and has been very slowly declining since then. Various people argue about various causes. Theories I've heard include wikipedia becoming too rule heavy, to community just not scaling past that point, to the internet being a lot more interesting now th…

> Wikipedia hit its editor peak around 2007 It's a very sharp peak. What happened in 2007?

no-follow was added to links in Jan 2007. I wonder if the drop was a drop in spam editors when SEO stopped working.

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#219

Post by busymom0 »

jonahbenton wrote: post #46
ramraj07 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What a ridiculous criticism of a valid article with a lot of facts. I have donated to Wikipedia several times and feel violated now. They might have not lied outright but acting as if you’re a poor Non profit when you are most definitely not poor is outrageous. I don’t know if Jimmy Wales is part of this entire charade but this is exactly what you expect to happen when you employ a CEO who charges north of half a mil…

I'm sorry, but your worldview is completely out of line with reality. The banner IS genuine. Non-profit funding IS scarce. Funding streams are fickle and Wikipedia has none of the monopolistic advantages that keep Apple and Google and FB and MSFT owners vastly vastly richer than any Wikipedia staff will ever be. By volunteering you ARE doing something so much more valuable than any post to any for profit social media…

Their banner says:

> “This Thursday Wikipedia really needs you. This is the 10th appeal we’ve shown you. 98% of our readers don’t give; they look the other way … We ask you, humbly, don’t scroll away.”

You think "really needs you" IS genuine?

And what does "volunteering" have to do with the question being raised in the article or by the OP you are responding to?

Re: Wikipedia is swimming in money–why is it begging people to donate?

#220

Post by kaba0 »

iKevinShah wrote: post #130
harikb wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is a ridiculous and ugly accusation to make. If you don’t know what it takes to run a globally available top site, it is better not throw stones at people.

I am not the original commentator but all the replies to this seem like attacking the individual (for a lack of better term) than providing a counter argument. They clearly state that they have been donating and assume that "their intention is to just increase their coffers with no clear plan on WHAT they are going to use it." Is that wrong ? Far from reality? Help them (and readers like me) get a clear understanding…

What about running a freely query-able database https://www.markhneedham.com/blog/2020/01/29/newbie-guide-qu...

Or hosting all the images? Or paying developers, devops, managers? Like sure, some middle manager may be unnecessary but a big company will have inefficiencies. Also, it is a good decision to not stop accepting funds once a monthly quota is reached since donations are fickle. An article like this may suddenly cause an outage in donations, they have to have reserves for such cases.

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